These Masks Are So Ultra-Realistic, It’s Scary
Do you need to be incognito during a bank robbery, scam, or fraud scheme? One company might have just the thing to make it easy. It’s called MaskonMoney, and their masks are so realistic that it scares me. The masks which appear to be manufactured internationally are touted as “legal” and sold for about $250. […]
Telegram Takedown : CEO Faces 20 Years in Prison
In a stunning development, Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested at Bourget airport near Paris, and charged with a long list of crimes, including terrorism, money laundering, drug trafficking, pedophile offenses, and fraud. He is detained and could face up to twenty years in prison. Arrested In France For Failing To […]
Weaponized AI Girlfriend Bots Will Fuel Romance Scams
Look at all the lonely people in this world. So many are looking for love. And now, with the help of AI, many are finding it in the unlikeliest of places – synthetic boyfriends and girlfriends. Services like Candy.ai, Dreamgf.ai, Replika, and AIGirlfriend WTF are blurring the lines between real and fake love, causing security […]
Fraud Shapeshifters In The Age Of AI
Deepfakes, voice clones, and digital doppelgangers. If you think the threat of AI is just a bunch of non-realistic hype. I have a warning for you. It is real. It is happening now. And we are only just getting started. I have spent the last year presenting on AI in fraud at many companies and […]
Gift Services Help Romance Scammers Con Victims
To a scammer, sending a gift is worth a thousand WhatsApp Text messages. To a victim, receiving that gift might just be what they needed to push them over the edge. And now, one investigator, Troy Gochenour of the Global Anti Scam Organization, has stumbled upon a new disturbing scam service emerging online to do […]
It’s Getting Real – HeyGen Releases Deepfake ChatBots
The digital doppelganger is one step closer to becoming a reality. This week, HeyGen released Interactive Avatars, which are essentially chatbots that use your voice and image to speak to people. Using two minutes of video you upload, HeyGen will clone your voice and image to create the Chatbot. The Chatbot will use a variety […]
Facebook’s New Downloadable AI Is Bad News For Fraud
This week, Mark Zuckerberg announced Llama 3.1, a powerful 405,000,000,000-parameter AI model that can be downloaded, configured, and used by anyone in the world for free. While the release has sparked excitement, it also raises concerns in the tech world. While the open-source approach promises to democratize AI development, it raises serious questions about potential […]
The Refund Mafia: Amazon Takes On Chin Chopa
Amazon took aim at professional refunders and the customers who use their services this week. And they threw the book at them, suing them for various issues, including fraud, breach of contract, use of trademarks, and anything else they could. At the heart of the criminal enterprise they targeted is an organization known as “Chin […]
Beautiful Scammers For Hire. Will Travel Too
An advertisement describes an unusual service that might catch your eye. It promises “Pure European real-life models” available for hire. Surprisingly, their services aren’t for photo shoots but something more sinister. These real-life models offer a suite of services tailor-made for deception: video calls, voice calls, identity verification, and even in-person meetings. Beautiful scammers are […]
Pig Butchers’ Paradise-Inside The Scammer Superstore
Imagine a market built for Pig Butchering scam operators, like a Walmart, where they could shop for everything they needed. Well, now it exists. It’s a shadowy network of thousands of merchants willing to help pig butcherers commit crimes. According to researchers, it may have ties to the highest levels of the Cambodian government. And […]
Uh-Oh, Yahoo Boys Are Perfecting Their Deepfakes
Don’t look now, but the Yahoo Boys are getting pretty good at perfecting their deepfakes, making them more believable by the day. David Maimon posted this proof of how good romance scammers are getting good of bringing their Catfishes to life and creating highly personalized messages to their victims. In this video, the scammers have […]
How Photoshop AI Is Turbo Boosting Insurance Scams
Insurance fraud has taken an alarming turn with the advent of AI-manipulated images. Allianz UK reported a 300% increase in AI-related insurance fraud last year, driven by accessible generative AI tools – some embedded within popular tools like Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop released “Generative AI Fill” in September 2023, and scammers realized it was an […]
New Hyper Realistic Deepfake Mask Can Pass ID Checks
New hyper-realistic masks are emerging online, far better than anything we’ve seen before. The masks are made in China and sold on Telegram channels. They can be used to bypass KYC selfie and liveness checks. Send In Any Photo, And Artists Will Create The Mask What makes the masks particularly interesting is how they are […]
Amazon Goes After DIVO, A New Professional Refunder
Amazon continues its war on professional refunding scammers. And they are not messing around. In a significant development, Amazon revealed that it identified the mastermind behind Rekk Refunds and subsequently exposed another professional refunding operation named “DIVO” this month. Recent Court Filings Reveal The Counterstrike In a recent court filing of an amended complaint against […]
FBI Seizes MyChargeback Site, Questions Loom
The FBI has seized MyChargeback.com, a company that claims to have worked with 800 banks and 450 law enforcement agencies and successfully recovered millions of dollars in disputed claims for its clients. But so far there are little answers of why the FBI seized the company. Signs Point To CryptoCurrency Return Fraud Scheme People close […]
Thousands Of AI Deepfake Faces For Scams
Can you be deepfaked? The answer may be yes because deepfakes are only getting better and better each day. Gary Warner of Dark Tower gave me a glimpse into the dark world of AI deepfakes being sold freely on Telegram. The Telegram site, which is completely in Chinese, sells thousands of real-time AI faces that […]
Facebook Is Totally Cool With Fraud University
Imagine a school you could go to learn how to commit fraud. Does it sound fun? Maybe even interesting? Well, you don’t have to go to some seedy place on the outskirts of town; you can just log into Facebook, the $1.3 Trillion company, and they are totally ok with that. Over 7,000 people have […]
ERC Sauce Still Hitting – IRS Reports 90% Fraud Rate
Covid Fraud 2.0 is still hitting. Months after the IRS stopped processing applications for the ERC (Employee Retention Tax Credit) program, it is still inundated with fraudulent applications. So much so that they asked Congress to extend a moratorium on the program initiated in September last year. Widespread Fraud And A Shocking Fraud Rate Since […]
Scammers Exploit AI Call Center Software To Scale Up
A scam call center has been using Voiso, an AI-powered enterprise call center tool, to streamline their fraudulent operations, according to internal data obtained by 404 Media. An insider with access provided a cache of call center data showing exactly how the scam operations used the AI. Voiso offers capabilities like automatically detecting voicemail, voice […]
Millions of Frankenstein Identities Discovered In UK
Many people in the UK may be living next to Frankensteins. A Lexis Nexis study, on a comprehensive analysis of more than 72 million consumer profiles, has uncovered a disturbing trend that experts have termed “Frankenstein cloning.” The research revealed that 2.8 million profiles exhibited clear indications of this fraudulent technique, in which criminals meticulously […]
Navy Fed Employee Stole Murdered Man’s Identity
Steven Verrett, an employee of Navy Federal Credit Union, has been arrested and charged with 15 counts of fraud and related offenses that involved the identity of a murdered man. According to his LinkedIn profile, Verrett worked as a Member Services Rep and pled “not guilty” in court last week. An Internal Investigator Alerted the […]